If you think about this as a marketing campaign for Coil then it seems to me to be brilliantly enlightened. I mean that sincerely, no sarcasm.
100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
261–270 of 277 posts
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can reallocate. Only top tier brands use ads, and the price of the advertising is part of the premium you pay for the brand name. For a lot of products, there's no functional difference with their cheaper alternatives. So, this brand premium is in fact discretionary spending that you could reallocate.
This is kind of an academic point. "Reshaping the economics of the web" probably shouldn't involve assuming all consumers will want to change what brand of laundry detergent they buy so they can read more blogs.
Why not ? Amazon has launched an offer where you can pay to access all kind of otherwise paywall gated media content (Amazon video and music and twitch prime etc) while also having 2 day delivery on a set of retail products not necessarily including your prefered brand. And people subscribe to Amazon, which finances the said media content, all the while changing their laundry detergent of choice.
I don't say this must be a direct rational choice, but it's already kind of happening in some places.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#263None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…
You are assuming that any effort will be trying to break the advertising paradigm in favour of a direct payment one. The article/grant doesn't seem to be about that. Whatever the business model, this seems to be more about breaking platform capture than breaking business model. The alphabook platforms particularly. Ultimately it's a big field. We have direct payment models (netflix, spotify, iTunes, kindle...), ad-su…
> Meanwhile, podcasts, a much freer medium, is both more profitable and quality oriented because of the platform openness.
I don't think this is true. Podcasts are more profitable since their production costs are lower, their audience skews wealthy and its inherently easier to make longer audio content, so it's possible to put more ads in.
Nothing is stopping YouTubers from not using the default ads and getting their own sponsors.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may be true. But I have no clue where those marketing expenditures go. I do recall reading about major firms realizing that most of their marketing expenditures more or less accomplished nothing. From a bottom-up perspective, I've read that ad income is typically on the order of $0.01-$0.10 per page view. As a more or less middle-class American, I'd be willing to pay that. Or at least, I would if ad blockers sto…
My thoughts as well. Between GDPR making current ad models harder to pull off and more risky and the fact that ads are getting less effective I think I might see an advertising bubble: Here are my thoughts, comments on why this is wrong are welcome: the market for online ads seems to have been growing more than consumers disposable income for two decades. Much of that might have come from cannibalizing other forms of…
I've argued this point before, and have hoped for comments from people who run ad-supported blogs. Or manage larger commercial sites. Just to see if my estimate low-balls ad income. But no ...
I do believe that we're in an ad bubble. For one thing, I've read that it's hard to measure effectiveness. You can look at revenue vs ad spending. But so many other factors affect revenue. Some you have measures for, such as how the economy's doing.
But for others there's no public data. Such as ad spending by competitors. You can measure that directly, or buy data from firms that do. I gather that's a key use for VPN services with residential IP blocks.
And then there's the fact that you're typically running multiple ad campaigns. So it may not be obvious which of them actually increased revenue.
Bottom line, I suspect that firms have been throwing money at online advertising. Either blindly, or seduced by bullshit from ad management firms. And so it's entirely possible that total ad spending is greater than users' discretionary income.
But if that disappeared, and was replaced by user micropayments, I doubt that all sites would be impacted equally. HN and Wilders wouldn't be impacted at all, for example, because they don't run "ads" per se. And popular sites generally could probably earn as much as they do now from ads. At least, if their paywalls couldn't be gamed.
So is there anything that would disappear that's valuable? I can't imagine that anyone would miss ad-supported link farms, for example.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#265It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…
Simple? Anonymous? Sounds like a perfect money laundering scheme.
All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about.
Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely.
The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Readability tried something like this. Readers liked it a lot more than publishers did. https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145822/http://blog.reada... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105891
this comment was telling: Keith Calder June 13, 2012 • 10:41 am I considered signing up for the Readability Publisher Program. Then I read the Terms of Service (amusingly I just read it yesterday, so this is all fresh in my mind). There is no way in hell I could agree to those terms. It basically gives Readability the right to do whatever they want with my content (which they were already doing, even without my permi…
Remember when people thought that selling unprotected mp3 files is crazy, and everyone woulDD just pirate them?
Well, yes, some do, and will do.
But in most cases buying is much less hassle, and costs very little, so there is no point to pirate just from the convenience point of view.
We need Spotify and Bandcamp for texts, with fast and frictionless payment, cheaply operated.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure where you got this idea. Ad-blocking might hurt in some future with hypothetically high enough percentages of traffic. Right now they make ads more effective (marginally). By self selection, a population with relatively low click-rates has removed themselves from having any money spent on them. This helps Google and Advertisers since right now, the volume of available impressions is plenty high, the name…
Advertisers converge toward pay per conversion on average, so removing non-converting traffic doesn't affect spend or payouts.
It’s unlike that add blockers are exclusively used by people who are completely unaffected by advertising.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's highly dependent on implementation. It's too much mental load to determine if that article you just read is worth $0.02 or not. Brave has a model where creators are automatically tipped, based on usage, which makes more sense imo.
The main issue with Brave's funding model is that it relies on consumer goodwill. While people might be willing to spend $0.02 to read a news article, they're less likely to allocate $10/month to funding online content creators "just because". There has to be some sort of incentive for most people to spend their money; if they can get the same experience for free, only a small minority will ever bother to pay. So the…
I often hit the free limit on say articles on New York Times and similar sites. After seeing the article title I am often interested enough to click on it to read it. But the count of free articles is full so I can't read the article. Now if it said "If you want to read this article there will be $0.50 charge in your next month's internet bill, I would probably go ahead and click and pay it in the next bill.
Problem is I don't want to open an account with just every possible newspaper and magazine on the web. What is needed is some common mechanism for most if not all content providers.
Maybe $0.50 is too much. Maybe $0.25 would be more like ok.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix&Co. are more expensive than bittorrent, and yet the former have gained significant market-share over the latter over the years. If you want to compete with free you have to offer superior quality and convenience.
And being legal has absolutely nothing to do with it?
That's part of the convenience, no pesky letters.
Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funded by coil
It's true that the money is not coming from the Mozilla Foundation, but as Coil is trusting the foundation with 100 M$ to make good use, the foundation could have asked 'hey, how about some money (from the 100 M$ or not) for our software, since it's what we are primarily known for?'
> since it's what we are primarily known for?
'And because without the browser, we'd just be an advocacy group'